RedZee visual search is fancier, less useful than text

There's a fancy new search engine in town: RedZee. It has a cute animated mascot and it presents search results in a cute new way: Using a "visual fan," that reminds me very much of Apple's Cover Flow.

Cover Flow is great. For covers. But as a search interface, unfortunately, the eye candy doesn't work. While it is very nice to be able to see your search results as visual images, you can't really judge the quality of a result from a thumbnail screen preview. Text is what tells you what the good results are.

RedZee does give you text excerpts, just like Google and every other olde-tyme engine. But you can only see one text blurb at a time. You have to "flow" the visuals to see others. That makes quick textual comparison of results impossible.

If you want to see Web previews in your search results, try the GooglePreview extension for Firefox.

I can't fault RedZee's search results (Webware is the #1 hit for "Web 2.0"), but the interface is too cute to be useful.